Nothing speaks more clearly than a
mumble
A stumbling blond boy in a morphine
haze
Who crumbles leaves, silt, beneath
his hiking boots
Then tumbles down a narcoleptic hill
unfazed.
“I am a camera,” claimed Christopher
Isherwood.
But what kind of camera he never
specified.
We’ve all known plenty of tracking
shot types.
Coming in for the close-up, zooming
through a starry field.
But Gus Van Sant’s camera guy is
willing to slouch
To make us wait while he smokes a
cigarette
To listen to the Velvet Underground
one more time
Not even the CD, the rubber album.
Gus, your great tactic is not to do
psychology.
We can all pencil that in by now; you
do tragedy.
Was it the Anxiety of Being that
struck when I was six?
Hiding out upstairs with Mighty
Mouse,
Kissing the fists of a muscle doll,
tossing him in the air,
While down below the rest of the kids
blew out the candles for me.
Then the plot lightens: Triumph of
the Will.
A 20-something birthday in Paris with
champagne & cigarettes.
30 at the Chelsea Hotel, kissing a
bartender in a stairwell.
Some other age, drunk in the back of
a jet.
To be 50 is to be a democratic
celebutante,
A Survivor, a plot point in a bluff
body.
Add a few years (I’m 53 today)
The metaphors get spent; a few
remaining verbs kick in:
Light up, burn rubber, grow a beard,
get rowdy.
“The best is yet to come,” you assure
your six-year-old self.
“You went off with the flying doll
and that has made all the difference.”
